About Jason Thibeault

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

I know where that January spike came from, and it had nothing to do with TAM

Shane Brady posted a quantitative analysis of web traffic for Skepchick and Freethought Blogs using Alexa’s daily reach statistics. While this data is certainly only a subset of the actual data — a sort of Nielsons ratings for the web — it’s probably pretty close to representative of the actual data we’ve collected via StatCounter. The traffic matches extremely closely to what we’ve seen ourselves on the Freethought Blogs end, though despite common misperceptions I have no access to Skepchick’s stats, not even through the hive mind uplink.

As you can see, FreethoughtBlogs is a relatively new blog network, so we don’t have the same history as with Skepchick.org. However, FreethoughtBlogs has substantially higher traffic than Skepchick.org and spikes might be harder to detect. That said, we can see some traffic increases that seem to correlate with some posts by Greta Christina that were heavily commented and cited. The trend for 2012, though, has primarily been flat. There was a slight increase during the days leading up to TAM2012, but nothing dramatic.

I hate to steal Greta’s thunder, and I hate to say “no, people don’t care that DJ did something wrong and Greta pointed it out” — no, really, I truly hate this — but that’s not where the spike came from. See, at the same time as that was happening, a post of mine went so viral we actually had server outages because of it, and the webmaster and I implemented Varnish and modified Apache’s worker agents, while we were live, to fix the problem and serve pageviews uninterrupted.

(I’ve removed the hard numbers from the side in case other folks don’t want their hit counts extrapolated from this graph… not that I mind personally, it already looks horrid for my average page views!)

The spike I present here represents my one single post dwarfing Pharyngula and Dispatches’ traffic put together, and that’s no small feat since they easily represent 80%+ of total traffic on any given day. It was a post that I had written prior to having migrated the blog to Freethought Blogs: Santorum’s Wifes Abortion Was Different, You See. I made the bold claim that the time that Rick Santorum’s unborn child’s life had to be terminated (via inducing birth prematurely) in order to save Karen’s life actually represented an abortion — an abortion that, under Santorum’s dictum, would become illegal and the doctor would have been charged with murder.

The post went viral after the January 3rd Iowa GOP debate when Rick Santorum became the media’s newest darling for having “won” (e.g., for having not looked as bad as the others). Nobody could have predicted that a blog post that I’d written in June of 2011 would have taken the net by storm six months later.

And it had nothing to do with someone attacking someone else within our community over their perceived faults.

Considering that’s much of what the people complaining about “controversialism” do on a daily basis, I can’t believe that supposed skeptics are snookered in by the meme that intra-community controversy drives traffic. We bloggers know damn well it doesn’t. If you want to drive traffic, you POST CATS.

Or hit the blog lottery and have the target of your criticism become the media’s newest darling in an election cycle.

Update: There was another post on the network that went gangbusters that same week: on January 7th, Dan Fincke’s post Openly Bisexual and Non-theist Woman (Who Rejected Parents’ Mormonism) Runs For U.S. Congress, a significantly more timely post about social justice and politics like mine. The day it was posted, Dan got roughly 70% of the hits that my post did on its first day. Its reception, I believe, represented more traffic at least than Pharyngula that day.

Bear in mind that the traffic for both posts represents many first-time visitors to the network, who likely didn’t translate to very many if any repeat visitors. On neither days were traffic for Pharyngula or Dispatches down, so these represent gigantic increases in overall server traffic. And the hits trickled in for quite some time on both posts afterward, latecomers to the viral spread, so the one-day spikes aren’t the totality of the story.

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About the author

Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.

The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember -- this is my property, not yours.

Hey, it’s absolutely true that getting one-time visitors can boost your traffic. My blog got linked to from Pharyngula, and even after the short-term spike had settled down, I had five to ten times the readership!

Yeah, it went from about two readers to a dozen or two. I’m sure that strategy is totally sustainable… /sarcasm

Pfft, please, everyone knows you can just fake that data that’s publicly available on a 3rd-party site! Hell, I’m not even going to bother checking Alexa, that’s how sure I am you #FTBullies are making it all up. PLEASE STOP TOTALLY RUINING MY ATHEISM!

[…] of getting eyes on your post, the claims can be dismissed out of hand a la Hitchens. Nevertheless, there’s good evidence to the contrary — not that that evidence would prevent people from repeatedly proffering the […]

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